the camp fire. You are tired of me, and
by the gods I am tired of you, and glad to be at the end of it. Come and
have done with it, for I am minded to see how many of you I can take
with me when I go."

They clustered at the door of the tent, peeping over each other's
shoulders, and none wishing to be the first to close with that laughing,
mocking giant. But something was pushed forward upon a spear point, and
as he saw it, Maximin groaned and his sword sank to the earth.

"You might have spared the boy," he sobbed. "He would not have hurt
you. Have done with it then, for I will gladly follow him."

So they closed upon him and cut and stabbed and thrust, until his knees
gave way beneath him and he dropped upon the floor.

"The tyrant is dead!" they cried. "The tyrant is dead," and from all the
camp beneath them and from the walls of the beleaguered city the joyous
cry came echoing back, "He is dead, Maximin is dead!"

* * * * *

I sit in my study, and upon the table before me lies a denarius of
Maximin, as fresh as when the triumvir of the Temple of Juno Moneta sent
it from the mint. Around it are recorded his resounding
titles--Imperator Maximinus, Pontifex Maximus, Tribunitia potestate, and
the rest. In the centre is the impress of a great craggy head, a massive
jaw, a rude fighting face, a contracted forehead. For all the pompous
roll of titles it is a peasant's face, and I see him not as the Emperor
of Rome, but as the great Thracian boor who strode down the hill-side on
that far-distant summer day when first the eagles beckoned him to Rome.

IX

THE RED STAR

The house of Theodosius, the famous eastern merchant, was in the best
part of Constantinople at the Sea Point which is near the church of
Saint Demetrius. Here he would entertain in so princely a fashion that
even the Emperor Maurice had been known to come privately from the
neighbouring Bucoleon palace in order to join in the revelry. On the
night in question, however, which was the fourth of November in the year
of our Lord 630, his numerous guests had retired early, and there
remained only two intimates, both of them successful merchants like
himself, who sat with him over their wine on the marble verandah of his
house, whence on the one side they could see the lights of the shipping
in the Sea of Marmora, and on the other the beacons which marked out the
course of the Bosphorus. Immediately at their feet lay